In our fifth Scrumconnect Spotlight, we sit down with our Head of Engineering, Prashant Kale, to learn more about how his interest in coding began, and advice he has for those interested in pursuing it in their career. Prashant is responsible for establishing Scrumconnect's data practice, alongside expanding the company's partnerships.
Q. Can you share the story of how you first became interested in coding and what motivated you to pursue it as a career?
A. I have been playing chess since age 4 and I remember playing Borlands Chess in the early 90’s on DOS 5 at my friend’s place. We used to find it difficult to beat it then. I got curious about how a computer program could beat us, the humans, and chose Computer Science as my career out of curiosity in this field.
Q. How do you keep up with the rapid advancements in AI technology? Are there specific resources or strategies you rely on to stay informed?
A. In 2007, I was handling a lot of data (Petabytes of analytics) at an investment firm and built a statistical tool under guidance of our portfolio manager, a former professor of finance. I wasn’t convinced that I understood the magic sauce, so kept researching online only to realise our portfolio manager had guided us to build an actual AI model from scratch. Realising the importance of maths and algorithms we used, I studied using online Youtube courses from world’s most well known universities. I track a few conferences in areas of my interest. As an ex-Amazonian, I track AWS re-Invent which is an excellent go-to place for many technological advances. I sometimes give myself a toy problem to solve and experience new tools myself, hands-on. This practically forces me to do some research. This approach has helped me solve real life problems for my clients.
Q. What has been the most rewarding experience or achievement in your coding career?
A. After my graduation, I was an intern at a public sector factory during the dot com boom. Those days, the factory had one i386 computer in the entire plant and there was a director who was working on a programme in C to optimise fuel consumption of an engine. Code was printed on paper and no one there knew how to fix errors in the actual code. I knew C and was able to edit the code and fix the bugs. Though it wasn’t a difficult assignment at that time, it was first time ever, I realised that I was able to make a difference to real life problems by using my coding skills
Q. What advice would you give to someone just starting out in coding?
A. Treat coding as a way to teach a computer to make your life easier. It needs patience. If you expect things on a platter, you are approaching it incorrectly. Coding is about problem solving. Lots of pieces of the puzzle will be missing initially. You will use a lot of maths, advanced algorithms as your career progresses. So be curious, if you don’t know something, or your code is not working properly, this is your chance to learn a new skill or technique.
As long as you stay curious, you will keep enjoying coding fully. If coding is your hobby, your professional life as a coder will be very enjoyable and rewarding.
Q. What does a typical day look like for you at Scrumconnect?
A. My priorities here are to establish our data and engineering practise. Partnerships, people, Processes, and Projects (customers) are essential ingredients of a successful practise.
In the corporate world, it is important to build lasting partnerships which help the client. I have been talking to a few organisations for partnerships – sometimes in the context of a tactical solution for a client service or sometimes regarding long term prospects.
As the technology landscapes at our client’s businesses evolve, we also have to evolve our own skills. This is where mentoring teams, building new skills within the organisation is necessary. We have designed several career paths for our employees to acquire new skills based on mentorship and Certifications. These are of strategic importance to 3 parties involved - our people, our company itself and the client. We have also worked on some internal initiatives within the pre-sales team to streamline our processes for acquiring new clients/projects. The early results are encouraging. We’ve successfully acquired key clients for new data projects which demonstrate our processes changes are working.
Q. What has been your biggest career challenge so far?
A. A few years ago, I was working at a large B2C retail company and on day 1 my mandate was to successfully complete one migration for a system which was used by at least 1000+ internal teams. By this migration, we were going to save in excess of $1.3bn annually. The system was live 24/7, 365 days a year, and we couldn’t afford a single second of downtime. My predecessors had tried this for 3.5 years without much progress. To make it more difficult, I didn’t have my own team on day 1; other teams members had their own mandates which were not necessarily aligned with my priorities.
I quickly realised that work won’t get done without negotiations. I started with a request for a team from my own manager. On a daily basis, the conversations would be about technical feasibility of the task in hand and also making sure that we don’t get on front page of news papers for any failed workflows, which were directly facing millions of customers worldwide. The engineers working on this initiative were absolute best in their fields. With their help and a few creative negotiations with internal teams/stakeholders, we were able to meet the target in less than 3 quarters.
I learnt a lot from this challenge. The first lesson was the importance of creating an ecosystem as a manager which helps your team to succeed. My manager excelled at this. The second lesson was the importance of ownership. The teams I worked with never worked half-heartedly. They always ensured that the end customer’s experience was always put ahead of internal priorities. The third lesson was the importance of automation and tooling. Such massive initiatives don’t succeed by manual interventions.
At Scrumconnect, I see similarities to this experience. Just look at the fact that Scrumconnect have delivered 20% of top 75 public facing government services impacting at least 50mn UK citizens. Parallels are obvious. The lessons I mentioned earlier are going to be handy here.
Q. What skill do you value the most?
A. Continuous learning is the skill I value the most. Recently, Scrumconnect sponsored the SoCraTes UK conference. It is a community focused non-profit international Software Crafters retreat organised by a group of volunteers. Lots of talented software crafters assembled in a cozy place near Oxford and we had a great opportunity to collaborate, code, discuss and share ideas. We had people with 3 months of experience, looking for a job, to people who have been in the industry for 35+ years and are about to retire. Everyone was there to keep themselves relevant in the industry. I believe this is a skill in itself.
In the age when lots of our mundane, routine workflows are getting fully automated with the help of AI, it is critical to acquire new skills.
Q. What do you enjoy most about working at Scrumconnect?
A. If you see our award-winning deliveries at DWP Get your State Pension Service, Winter Fuel Payments Service and HMCTS digital transformation of the entire criminal justice system, you will notice, we have been successful in making a very good impact on the lives of our fellow citizens. For a young and small organisation like ours that is an extraordinary achievement.
We’re a growth oriented company and our stated goal is to grow to 1000+ people by 2028. I always look forward to strategic planning sessions with senior leadership. Our focus has always been making a positive impact around us. Being a part of this revolution and evolution is a very enjoyable experience.
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At Scrumconnect, we specialise in navigating challenges by leveraging Agile methodologies that foster resilience, adaptability, and strategic growth. We partner with clients to not only meet these challenges head-on but to turn them into opportunities for growth.
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We are committed to continuously providing the best in tech with our people, practices and technology through our certifications.
Scrumconnect is committed to disability rights.
This enhanced government-endorsed standard demonstrates that we have implemented the essential plus security requirements for protecting your data, and that of your client’s, against unskilled internet-based cyber attackers.
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An integrated management system, designed for ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 27001:2015, operates across our business. These are regularly reviewed in order to ensure the continuous improvement to meet the needs of our customers and stakeholders.